Charging infrastructure: High downtime costs burden businesses and fleets
Image: Mercedes‑Benz (illustrative)
As charging infrastructure expands rapidly in Germany, companies face increasing structural and financial challenges. Diverse hardware and software solutions, unclear responsibilities, and inadequate service models make operations more difficult. Outages of charging stations incur significant costs and can lead to reputational damage if disruptions last for extended periods.
Robin Karpp, CEO of Heidelberg Amperfied, pointed out in an interview with the Edison portal to the economic consequences of limited charging point availability. If this drops from 97 to 95 percent in a CPO charging park, it results in approximately five additional hours of downtime per day for ten charging points. In larger charging parks, this can lead to an annual revenue difference of up to 24,000 euros. In logistics, even one hour of downtime can significantly impact operations and incur annual costs of around 92,000 euros.
Business fleets also have to account for significant additional costs due to unavailable vehicles, missed customer appointments, and last-minute schedule changes. On top of that, there is the administrative workload associated with documenting issues, coordinating services, and handling repairs. For companies with multiple locations, Karpp estimates this workload at around 70,000 euros per year, equivalent to the cost of a full-time position.
Heidelberg Amperfied therefore recommends intelligent, vendor-agnostic monitoring along with a proactive maintenance and repair service. By continuously monitoring operational and performance data, technical problems can be identified before charging stations fail. The collected data is also intended to support location optimization and future expansion decisions.
Additionally, according to the company, it relies on certified service technicians for charging hardware from around 15 well-known third-party manufacturers, as well as a globally available parts and logistics network. Various performance packages are intended to ensure fast response times and higher availability of charging stations.
Karpp views reliable daily operation as the key factor for the long-term cost-effectiveness of charging infrastructure, while in the CPO industry, operators are increasingly delegating responsibility for performance, availability, and efficiency to hardware manufacturers.
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About the author
Thomas Langenbucher is an expert in electromobility with professional experience in the automotive industry and finance sector. Since 2011, he has been covering electric vehicles, sustainable technologies, and mobility solutions for ecomento.de. Learn more.
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